by ethnici Tanks blocked the streets and helicopters circled overhead as the Kurdish men, including Safar's older brother, were bound and taken away in buses. Safar and Namikh, along with other Kurdish women and children, were loaded onto a different set of buses and driven into the mountains, where they were dropped off and told to walk north. As the two women walked, they were bombed by aircraft overhead; several neighbors died in front of them. Safar and her mother staved at the Iranian bor- der for three months. When they ven- tured back to Kirkuk, their house---along with two thousand others in their neigh- borhood-had been destroyed. "Thank God, all I found was dust," Safar said. "Thank God for our safe " A staff lavvyer was filling out a lengthy form for them. "Was the house brick or clay?" "Brick," Safar's mother said. "Finish, please. I'm sick, I can't wait." "Do you want to take the land, or do you want compensation?" the lavvyer asked. "We want the land," Safar said. The lawyer wrote tills down, and the fact that they needed money to build a new house. "Why didn't you go to the commission for people with damaged houses in 1991?" A ::: :- t, r .,.---- to them. The peshmerga did it to us." The women agreed, and there was a moment of good feeling between the old neighbors. "Only God, and America, can solve the problem," the Arab said. What about the new Iraqi govern- ment? 1 asked. " I d ' kn " th th . d " I on t o e mo er Sal. S there a government right now or not?" The staff lavvyer finished filling out the form. The daughter smiled and said, "I think there will be justice and our case will be finished." I asked the Arab if there would be justice in Kirkuk. He hesitated. "I don't think so," he said. ''It's very difficult. Those who are now in the city don't understand each other. I am a son of Kirkuk"--an original Arab-"and for thirty-five years nobody could hurt us. Now I'm feeling upset, because of my house." I asked the women if Kurds would ever do to Arabs what Arabs had done to Kurds. "No, they won't do that," the daughter said. "Believe me, I swear to God they won't do that." "They've done more than the Arabs," Shaker said. The daughter stiffened and eyed her former neighbor cold1 "How is that?" she asked. "I know one person who made half a tribe run away from their houses in the city/' he responded. The warm feeling was gone. The daughter pointed out that Shaker had already forgot- ten what had happened to the Kurds in Kirkuk. Abruprly, she excused herself and helped her mother out of the Iraq Prop- erty Claims Commission. "I did," the mother said. "1 gave them an application, but they didn't give us anything." Ayob Shaker, an Arab man in his late thirties, came over and said hello to the two women with a shy reserve. He had once been their neighbor. On the day of the deportation, he had helped other Kurds in the area load furniture on the buses. He was also a soldier in the Re- publican Guard, and when he came back to Kirkuk from Baghdad after the Amer- icans had deposed Saddam he found a group of peshmerga, including another former neighbor, occupying his house. Though Kirkuk's property-claims statute was amended recendyto allow Arabs dis- placed after the war to make claims as well, Shaker said that his children had been threatened by the peshmerga, and he was afraid to file for compensation. "Believe me, nobody knows for sure, but mosrly it's the Kurds who are run- ning the city," he said. "For me as an Arab, if I want a job I have to get a paper from a Kurdish party saying I'm not a criminal." Chance had brought him to this office on the same day as the two women he used to greet every morn- ing on his way to work He felt that the very injustice he had once seen done to them was now befalling him. "The same thing," he said. "The government did it [J f: ". .:..;...: - "';;:-- ""'- ';'w . " . . ..... , - ":.: - , ' , -- ., ' , " , ' , ' ,' ' ," , . . . .. ".- ..". ". . . ." .".- ". . ... . -. , , j , -;::.:,- :.- >>: :.. : . ;.) j}:. .:=;':"."'"" ûjCLù>>-- ''Daddy doesn't know any magic tricks. Daddy knows accounting tricks. " B ecause Kirkuk isn't yet the scene of open combat, the city remains a hidden flaw in the broken Iraqi landscape. But what is now a local dispute be- tween neighbors will soon be- come one of the greatest obsta- cles to making Iraq democratic and keeping it whole. In the summer of 2003, I had a con- versation with Barham Salih, who was then the prime minis- ter of the regional government in Suleimaniya. A strong sup- porter of the American inva-